Shannon O’Neill

Late notice, but this looks interesting:

SEMINAR

Digital Democracy Unpacked: A Critical Mapping of Five Ideal Typical Discourses

Dr Lincoln Dahlberg, School of Journalism and Communications
The University of Queensland

When: 1 June, 5-6.30pm
Where: UTS Broadway, Building 3, Level 2 (Room 210)

Digital democracy has become an increasingly popular topic among
academics, political commentators, and policy makers: there is much
talk about the potential of the Internet and other digital media
enhancing democracy. There has also been plenty of action, with
governments, civic organizations, universities and activists,
investigating this potential and supporting digital democracy
initiatives. All this commentary, research, policy making, and project
work draws on a diversity of understandings of digital democracy.
However, there is a lack of resources that clearly outline and examine
this diversity. This paper undertakes an ideal-typical reading and
critical evaluation of five digital democracy discourses and their
variations, with the aim of bringing attention to the range of
possibilities for democracy supported by digital media, and the
advantages and disadvantages of these different possibilities.

Lincoln is a post-doctoral research fellow in the School of Journalism
and Communication at The University of Queensland. He is co-editor of
the journal New Zealand Sociology and of the collection Radical
Democracy and the Internet (Palgrave, June 2007). Lincoln’s current
research involves a critical investigation of the practices and
meanings surrounding Internet use, with particular focus on the
extension of democratic cultures. He can be contacted at:
l.dahlberg@uq.edu.au

Hosted by: Research Initiative on International Activism:
www.international.activism.hss.uts.edu.au
James Goodman, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences,
University of Technology Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007.
Phone: (612) 9514 2714 Fax: (612) 9514 2332
Email: james.goodman@uts.edu.au
Web: www.international.activism.uts.edu.au

This Is Not Art is on in Newcastle this weekend. It’s my favourite Australian festival - if you’ve never been, you should check it out. I’ll be doing a couple of talks and a couple of performances.

Short notice, but I just found out about this:

Actor Network Theory - special workshop
The Institute for Sustainable Futures will hold a special roundtable/workshop on Actor Network Theory (ANT)
on Wednesday 19th July
from 11am till 1pm
at Level 11, Building 10, Jones Street
[University of Technology, Sydney - City Campus]

The aim of the workshop is to share the accumulated wisdom of various ISF PhD students, a guest from Electrical Engineering, Robert Jarman and adjunct Prof. Paul Bryce, who have used ANT, and to enable others to take the first steps in seeing what ANT might offer their research approach.

ANT offers a way of observing and analysing a process of change and, in combination with action research, ANT can identify and guide interventions to effect change. (Bryce & Yasukawa 2004).

Come along if you wish to learn more.
If you would like more information or to RSVP, please email Juliet Willetts (Juliet.Willetts@uts.edu.au) by COB Tuesday 18th.

Although I’m crazy busy at the moment, preparing to travel etc., I’m going to attend this. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how ANT, as well as D&G’s ‘assemblage’ can be used for theorizing appropriation. Reading Slack & Wise’s Culture & Technology a while ago confirmed that these should be fruitful areas to explore.

Also I’ve been commissioned by the ABC to make a five minute piece on the theme of ‘figure in a soundscape’ as part of a new radiophonic initiative. My piece is provisionally called ‘Figure/Network’ - it will engage with some of these theoretical concerns through sound, using granular synthesis, and generative, patch-based processes. It’s due in a couple of weeks (the day before I leave!) so this workshop is timely.

Thanks to Seb (who has been writing lots of interesting stuff about social networking, Web 2.0, etc. over at fresh + new) for telling me a few weeks ago about this paper, “You must be logged in to do that!” : Myspace and Control by Fred Scharmen, which discusses how young ppl use sites such as Myspace to escape (parental) control, only to be controlled in other ways.

I’ve been meaning to write about it here, but haven’t been in the mood for blogging - too many distractions. But today I came across a response to it by Anne Galloway, via an interesting post by Glen.

These issues are nothing new, as anyone who has been involved in tactical media, etc. knows. And we all know how punk and the counterculture before it were packaged and sold to the mainstream. I think the low point for me was when William Burroughs did those Nike TV commercials in the 90s.

There was a lot of discussion a few years ago about how tactical media should give way to strategic media (in fact the term ‘tactical media’ is rarely used these days). I don’t know… I think both approaches are important. Maybe resistance is futile, but it is still meaningful for those doing it. The problem is with a dynamic which positions the subject as victim &/or consumer. That’s why I’ve always loved those artists who seem to create their own world (e.g. the early work of Negativland). Another world is possible *right now*. “Just live it”. Of course there is a slippery slope from that to a disengagement with important political issues in the ‘real’ world. Or the vision gets worn down by experience. It seems that the challenge is to successfully combine idealism with pragmatism, imagination with engagement, spontaneity with strategy. Or will that still inevitably feed the system?

Can the appropriation feedback loop be broken?

My review of the NOW now festival for RealTime is now online (and in print). In the same issue is Ben Byrne’s response to Nigel Helyer’s ‘critique‘ of laptop music performance.

Some interesting free talks coming up in Sydney:

1) Key Concepts lecture series at Sydney Uni. A follow-up to last year’s Key Thinkers series which I couldn’t make due to work commitments. I’m looking forward to attending some of these.

Wednesday 3 May ‘Terra Nullius’ Andrew Fitzmaurice
Wednesday 10 May ‘Nationalism’ Glenda Sluga
Wednesday 17 May ‘Freedom’ Duncan Ivison
Wednesday 24 May ‘Truth’ Huw Price
Wednesday 31 May ‘Racism’ Ghassan Hage
Wednesday 7 June ‘Death’ Jennann Ismael
Wednesday 14 June ‘Globalisation’ Raewyn Connell

Venue: NEW VENUE FOR 2006 Footbridge Theatre The University of Sydney

Outspoken novelist, commentator and new-tech guru CORY DOCTOROW debates the future for filmmakers and media artists in this special event presented by Popcorn Taxi and the Australian Film Commission. Doctorow asks where does Hollywood get off, “with its antiquated business model, in treating the media user as a criminal with their draconian copyright laws?…Such laws limit the creative possibilities for artists and users.”An innovativeand brilliant thinker Doctorow proposes a revolutionary new model for media artists that defies the Digital Rights Management: “Technologies that seek to restrict the copying and use of digital works are wrong and wrong-headed”, Cory says. “Wrong because they don’t work, because they suppress creativity, and because they treat honest users like crooks. Wrong-headed because they seek to make digital works act as much as possibly like analog works. No DVD owner wants a way to do less with her movies, and companies that try to sell her technologies to do this deserve to go broke.”This debate is essential for any filmmaker and media artist who wants to give serious consideration to the future of their Work. The evening will include an interview and audience Q&A conducted by MARCUS GILLEZEAU, filmmaker (Firelight) and a specialist in digital production technologies.

popcorn taxi
Rated: R18+ EXEMPT from CLASSIFICATION
Time: 7.00pmDate: Wednesday, April, 19th, 2006
Where: Greater Union Bondi Junction
Address: Level 6, 500 Oxford Street, Westfield Bondi Junction Entry: Free

Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of ‘assemblage’ is going to be important in my PhD for thinking about ‘appropriation’.

A friend in Sydney is assembling a symposium on assemblage. There will be speakers on such topics as ‘minor literature’, cultural industries and (post-)subcultures.

The details, including date, are yet to be fixed, and it will be something of an underground event i.e. outside of academia and with little publicity. If you’re interested in participating (as a speaker or punter) please let me know.

Bettered by the borrower - copyrights and music composition

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

Famous Cannabis Users

Google Idol

THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY FOR CHILDS

The Mercury Theatre on the Air

Nyet

sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! (awesome software!)

SONY admits that CD/44.1PCM is inferior

Stagg Chili Recipes

Video Downloader

xTal - free mp3 DJ VSTi plugin

Zaatar Mix

I’ve started reading Terry Eagleton’s After Theory. It’s quite enjoyable - less rigorous than Literary Theory - An Introduction (not surprising as it’s a different sort of book - he’s not obliged to summarise key thinkers one after the other) and more like a curmudgeonly rant, albeit a lucid, witty and ethical one.

What’s missing is his own biography (although he has written his memoirs elsewhere). It looms large in the background, but I want him to acknowledge it more - maybe he will later in the book. For example, when he says that cultural theory is “really a product of an extraordinary decade and a half, from about 1965 to 1980″ (pp. 23-24) and that “Not much that has been written since has matched the ambitiousness and originality of these founding mothers and fathers” (p. 1) he sounds a lot like those irritating baby boomers who drone on about how music was so much better in their day.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationships between art, theory and politics, so I found the following passage interesting:

Marxism had been badly tarnished in the West by the monstrosities of Stalinism. But many felt that it had also been discredited by changes in capitalism itself. It seemed ill-adapted to a new kind of capitalist system which revolved on consumption rather than production, image rather than reality, the media rather than cotton mills. Above all, it seemed ill-adapted to affluence. The post-war economic boom may have been on its last legs by the 1960s, but it was still setting the political pace. Many of the problems which preoccupied militant students and radical theorists in the West were ones bred by progress, not poverty. They were problems of beaurocratic regulation, conspicuous consumption, sophisticated military hardware, technologies which seemed to be lurching out of control. The sense of a world which was claustrophobically coded, administered, shot through with signs and conventions from end to end, helped to give birth to structuralism, which investigates the hidden codes and conventions which produce human meaning. The 1960s were stifling as well as swinging. There were anxieties about packaged learning, advertising and the despotic power of the commodity. Some years later, the cultural theory which examined all this would itself be at risk of becoming one more glossy commodity, a way of touting one’s symbolic capital. These were all questions of culture, lived experience, utopian desire, the emotional and perceptual damage wrought by a two-dimensional society. They were not matters which Marxism traditionally had much to say about.

Pleasure, desire, art, language, the media, the body, gender, ethnicity: a single word to sum all these up would be culture. Culture, in a sense of the word which included Bill Wyman and fast food as well as Debussy and Dostoevsky, was what Marxism seemed to be lacking. And this is one reason why the dialogue with Marxism was pitched largely on that terrain. Culture was a way for the civilized, humanistic left to distance itself from the crass philistinism of actually existing socialism. Nor was it surprising that it was cultural theory, rather than politics, economics or orthodox philosophy, which took issue with Marxism in those turbulent years. Students of culture quite often tend to be politically radical, if not easily disciplined. Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness is a deeply disturbing affair.

In any case, art and literature encompass a great many ideas and experiences which are hard to reconcile with the present political set-up. They also raise questions of the quality of life in a world where experience itself seems brittle and degraded. How in such conditions can you produce worthwhile art in the first place? Would you not need to change society in order to flourish as an artist? Besides, those who deal with art speak the language of value rather than price. They deal with works whose depth and intensity show up the meagreness of everyday life in a market-obsessed society. They are also trained to imagine alternatives to the actual. Art encourages you to fantasize and desire. For all these reasons, it is easy to see why it is students of art or English rather than chemical engineering who tend to staff the barricades.

Students of chemical engineering, however, are in general better at getting out of bed than students of art and English. Some of the very qualities which attract cultural specialists to the political left are also the ones which make them hard to organize. They are the jokers in the political pack, reluctant joiners who tend to be more interested in utopia than trade unions. Unlike Oscar Wilde’s philistine, they know the value of everything and the price of nothing. You would not put Arthur Rimbaud on the sanitation committee. In the 1960s and 70s, this made cultural thinkers ideal candidates for being inside and outside Marxism simultaneously. In Britain, a prominent cultural theorist like Stuart Hall occupied this position for decades, before shifting decisively into the non-Marxist camp.

To be inside and outside a position at the same time - to occupy a territory while loitering sceptically on the boundary - is often where the most intensely creative ideas stem from. It is a resourceful place to be, if not always a painless one. One has only to think of the great names of twentieth-century English literature, almost all of whom moved between two or more national cultures. Later, this ambiguous position was to be inherited by the new ‘French’ cultural theorists. Not many of them were French in origin, and not many of those who were were heterosexual. Some hailed from Algeria, some from Bulgaria, and others from utopia. As the 1970s wore on, however, quite a few of these erstwhile radicals began to come in from the cold. The passage toward the depoliticized 80s and 90s had been opened.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory, pp. 38-40.

Two very different American critics endebted to Freud are Kenneth Burke, who eclectically blends Freud, Marx and linguistics to produce his own suggestive view of the literary work as a form of symbolic action, and Harold Bloom, who has used the work of Freud to launch one of the most daringly original literary theories of the past decade. What Bloom does, in effect, is to rewrite literary history in terms of the Oedipus complex. Poets live anxiously in the shadow of a ’strong’ poet who came before them, as sons are oppressed by their fathers; and any particular poem can be read as an attempt to escape this ‘anxiety of influence’ by its systematic remoulding of a previous poem. The poet, locked in Oedipal rivalry with his castrating ‘precursor’, will seek to disarm that strength by entering it from within, writing in a way which revises, displaces and recasts the precursor poem; in this sense all poems can be read as rewritings of other poems, and as ‘misreadings’ or ‘misprisions’ of them, attempts to fend off their overwhelming force so that the poet can clear a space for his own imaginative originality. Every poet is ‘belated’, the last in a tradition; the strong poet is the one with the courage to acknowledge this belatedness and set about undermining the precursor’s power. Any poem, indeed, is nothing but such an undermining - a series of devices, which can be seen both as rhetorical strategies and psychoanalytic defence mechanisms, for undoing and outdoing another poem. The meaning of a poem is another poem.

Bloom’s literary theory represents an impassioned, defiant return to the Protestant Romantic ‘tradition’ from Spenser and Milton to Blake, Shelley and Yeats, a tradition ousted by the conservative Anglo-Catholic lineage (Donne, Herbert, Pope, Johnson, Hopkins) mapped out by Eliot, Leavis and their followers. Bloom is the prophetic spokesman for the creative imagination in the modern age, reading literary history as an heroic battle of giants or mighty psychic drama, trusting to the ‘will to expression’ of the strong poet in his struggle for self-origination. Such doughty Romantic individualism is fiercely at odds with the sceptical, anti-humanist ethos of a deconstructive age, and indeed Bloom has defended the value of individual poetic ‘voice’ and genius against his Derridean colleagues (Hartman, de Man, Hillis Miller) at Yale. His hope is that he may snatch from the jaws of a deconstructive criticism he in some ways respects a Romantic humanism which will reinstate author, intention and the power of the imagination, Such a humanism will wage war with the ’serene linguistic nihilism’ which Bloom rightly discerns in much American deconstruction, turning from the mere endless undoing of determinate meaning to a vision of poetry as human will and affirmation. The strenuous, embattled, apocalyptic tone of much of his writing, with its outlandish spawning of esoteric terms, is witness to the strain and desperateness of this enterprise. Bloom’s criticism starkly exposes the dilemma of the modern liberal or Romantic humanist - the fact that on the one hand no reversion to a serene, optimistic human faith is possible after Marx, Freud and post-structuralism, but that on the other hand any humanism which like Bloom’s has taken the agonizing pressures of such doctrines is bound to be fatally compromised and contaminated by them. Bloom’s epical battles of poetic giants retain the psychic splendour of a pre-Freudian age, but have lost its innocence: they are domestic rows, scenes of guilt, envy, anxiety and aggression. No humanistic literary theory which overlooked such realities could offer itself as reputably ‘modern’ at all; but any such theory which takes them on board is bound to be sobered and soured by them to point where its own capacity to affirm becomes almost maniacally wilful. Bloom advances far enough down the primrose path of American deconstruction to be able to scramble back to the heroically human only by a Nietzschian appeal to the ‘will to power’ and ‘will to persuasion’ of the individual imagination which is bound to remain arbitrary and gestural. In this exclusively patriarchal world of fathers and sons, everything comes to centre with increasing rhetorical stridency on power, struggle, strength of will; criticism itself for Bloom is just as much a form of poetry as poems are implicit literary criticism of other poems, and whether a critical reading ’succeeds’ is in the end not at all a question of its truth-value but of the rhetorical force of the critic himself. It is humanism on the extreme edge, grounded in nothing but its own assertive faith, stranded between a discredited rationalism on the one hand and an intolerable scepticism on the other.

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory - An Introduction, pp. 183-185

The first par in particular suggests a psychoanalytic approach to thinking about appropriation, originality, influence, etc. I’m skeptical of psychoanalysis, but it’s still something to which I should give some consideration.